Among the ingredients of cream preparations to be put into the chocolate center or to be sandwiched between two pieces of baked confectionery such as biscuits and cookies, there has hitherto been widely used nut paste as a flavoring material. When nut paste having a high oil content is used at large amounts, however, low-melting fat ingredients contained in the paste (e.g., at least 95% of almond oil is composed of oleic acid and linoleic acid) will migrate in the chocolate layer or in the baked cereal layer, thereby causing the deformation of products as well as the quality deterioration such as a change in the quality and a change in the sense of eating.
To eliminate these defects, various attempts have been made; for example, (a) high-melting fractions of unhydrogenated palm oil are mixed with peanut butter to prepare a cream preparation (see, e.g., JP-A 50-71865) and (b) a mixture of hydrogenated palm oil and peanut oil is added to a cream preparation (see, e.g., JP-A 53-139748). For use in nut-flavored fillings, however, satisfactory effects cannot be obtained. In particular, method (a) gives the flavor of peanut to the cream composition; therefore, its applications are inevitably restricted to the production of peanut-flavored confectionery.